See posts about...

My other sites...

Drupal Commerce in a git.d.o world

Because we were doing our Commerce module development on GitHub and exporting to CVS, we need to make some changes now that the Git migration on d.o is complete. Obviously the main Git repository for the project is now on d.o instead of GitHub. To clone the latest code, you can follow the helpful Git instructions included on Drupal project pages.

All of my D7 projects now include a 7.x-1.x branch that you should track to get the latest commits. I also updated the various dev releases of Commerce, Address Field, and my Commerce contribs to be snapshots of this branch, essentially deprecating master. I'm trying to decide the best thing to do about those pesky master branches and will likely just git rm everything in them and leave behind a README indexing the various HEADs in the repository.

Many people had forks of both the old Commerce repository and my development repository on GitHub. Additionally, some of you may have pending commits that haven't been pulled yet. If this is the case for you, please generate a patch instead of a new pull request and post it to the issue queue. As of this point I have no plans to rewrite the commit history of the new official repository to match the existing history on GitHub, meaning I cannot cleanly pull from your repositories.

(I have read Ben's blog post, and I'm sure there are some other finer aspects of Git that I'm just ignorant of to accommodate this... but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle when forks will need to be updated across the board anyways.)

This seems a little brute force, but I think it's for the best. The commit graph on d.o is now a nice tidy straight line, whereas the old graph on GitHub was a fractured mess that included several instances of duplicated commits thanks to botched merges and branching. We were still learning an appropriate Git workflow at the time and made several mistakes that not only dirtied up the history but also made it hard to sort out how to pull from various forks. (Accordingly, current contributor statistics on Ohloh are inaccurate anyways.)

This does mean some contributor credit in the commits will be lost, but I'll be updating various project pages to credit beta contributors for their commits. Regardless, I've been crediting contributors in commit messages all along, and merge commits show whose repository the merged commits came from. As of this point, I think the loss of a little meta information is worth the clean slate with the new repositories. Flame away in the comments if this is the stupidest idea you've ever heard... just want to make sure my plans are clear.

While we figure out how to handle pull requests in an environment that doesn't natively support them, in your issue please indicate your repository URL (whether it's a d.o sandbox of GitHub fork) and branch that I should pull from to compare. Bonus points for attaching a patch for quick review on site (or linking to the diff on the appropriate web interface). I'll add your repository as a remote so you don't have to post it every time. Additionally, I'd prefer it if you used a single branch per issue you're addressing with the branch name simply being the nid of the issue - makes it quite easy for me to branch and pull locally.

(I should mention that the good ol' patch process is perfectly fine if you don't want to maintain a public repository for me to pull from. You can just make your commits locally and diff 'em all in one fell swoop to create a patch for review.)

This is essentially what we've been doing on GitHub, so no surprises here for existing contributors. I'll leave the GitHub repos up for a while, but I'm updating their READMEs to point to the new repository on d.o. Once tested and approved, these guidelines will find their way into a handbook page for posterity's sake.

Comments

IMO your plan is fine. But pull requests work in any git environment. Github just makes them fancy. Anybody can ask you to pull from a branch or from another repo - they just have to give you the URL or branch to pull from.

I've been really excited about Drupal Commerce, but when do you think it'll be ready for a production site?

I'm working for a small business and we have very peculiar needs for our order's data structure which Drupal Ecommerce and Ubercart don't really meet. Drupal Commerce however seems flexible to meet those needs and more. Right now I'm building their site in Drupal 6 just because so many of the Drupal 7 modules are still beta or unstable, but in the future I definitely want to make the leap to Drupal 7 and I'm looking forward to utilizing Drupal Commerce in that conversion. Keep up the good work.